What are the problems with IDML? (fwd)

I forgot to comment:

1.A single META tag can only describe one attribute-value
                pair. To describe a product or page in as much detail as
                IDML requires many META tags. 

BFD.  So what, it doesn't matter, it is just a few more characters, and
then everyone else can parse it fine.  But *no* they had to be different.

2.All META tags must appear in the HEAD section of the
                document. The fact is only 4% of documents on the web use
                HEAD tags and a mere 0.5% use META tags

What kind of snake oil salesman logic is this???  If only .5% use meta
tags, how many people are going to use their proprietary, lesser known
tags!  On top of that - "People don't use HEAD, therefore any tag that
needs to go into HEAD is bad."

WHAT?  The <HEAD> tags are not required.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<html>
<title>spew</title>
<LINK REV=MADE HREF="mailto:spider@livingston.com">
<META NAME="fu" CONTENT="bar">
<BODY>
etc deleted

That is perfectly valid!


Because you need several META tags to specifiy a product or
            page, it can be hard to discern where one group ends and the
            other begins. This also introduces maintenance problems: META
            tags that belong together could easily be broken apart. 

First - the deliberately formated the page to make it look worse.
Second - is using comments to mark off blocks beyond them?

2.META tags are poorly suited to specifying products. Some
            Identify merchants have over 600,000 products; to catalog their
            products using only META is ugly and impractical. We found
            that a separate, dedicated tag just for product-tagging and
            content-tagging provided greater flexibility and clarity. 

I don't get this, I really don't.  I've looked at their tags and I don't
see anything I can't do with META.

3.The web is a big place. It's getting bigger all the time, doubling in
            size every 2-3 months. In order to keep up-to-date with the
            effort of cataloging content and products, the process of
            gathering this information has to be automated. It is simply
            easier to teach a robot to understand IDML tags than a group of
            META tags. 

BULLSHIT!!!  Anyone who has coded any kind of text parser knows that once
you can parse one META tage you can pretty much parse them all and generate
the name-value pairs.  This is near to an outright lie.

4.The big reason: To succeed, IDML had to be simple and quickly
            adopted -- just like HTML. We found that few publishers today
            use HEAD properly, and hardly any use META. 

See my points above:
1. HEAD is ***NOT*** required.
2. If they aren't using META it doesn't mean they *CAN'T*.  *I* don't use
meta - but I don't WANT TO!  I don't want to use IDML either.  And if I
pick one it is going to be META because it is universal.

We're not the first people to propose a content-tagging system. We
        believe that the others never caught on because they were too complex
        for non-computer scientists to implement. META is a technical
        language; IDML is a business language. 

bullshit bullshit bullshit

-MZ
--
Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs
Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com
For support requests: support@livingston.com  <http://www.livingston.com/> 
Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway  #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566

Received on Thursday, 15 August 1996 23:11:11 UTC